MCC takes on non-traditional classes

As the spring semester approaches for Muscatine Community College, students will be signing up for classes and exploring their options. What some students don’t know is the wide variety of non-traditional classes that the school offers. Muscatine Community College offers classes as simple as traditional composition and calculus but also classes such as film, acting, and even a Harry Potter class. They offer these non-traditional classes to meet students’ interests and offer credit hours.

One of the newest and most non-traditional classes is the Harry Potter class. The official name of the class is Film as Literature: Harry Potter (Literature 135). This coming spring, the class is offered on Tuesdays and Thursdays, 11:20- 12:50. The class is worth three credit hours and can be put toward elective credits.

Obviously, in a non-traditional class like this, they do non-traditional activities. One of the activities that they do during class is storyboarding. Storyboarding is when the students brainstorm something that they feel the Harry Potter movies are missing, and then create a storyboard showing how they would put together the scene, creating camera angles, color schemes, and picking out music that would work best for the scene.

“I think students like it because they get to make up for something they feel belongs in the movies but didn’t get to see,” says Jim Compton, the instructor of the class.

Student Brittany Greene is taking the Harry Potter class for the first time and has positive feedback for her first semester of the class.

“My favorite part of the Harry Potter class would have to be the in-depth discussions about the books and how they differentiate from the movies,” she says.

It was Compton’s idea to start offering the class to students. Compton taught a Lord of the Rings class that is very similar to the Harry Potter class back in 2005.

“I like the idea of patterns in literature, and one set of patterns I’ve always found interesting is those that are part of adaptation – taking a piece of literature, like a novel, and converting it into another form, like a film,” says Compton.

These classes are offered for students to bring out the creative side that they can’t always express in traditional classes.

If you have any questions regarding the class, contact Jim Compton at MCC at (563) 288-6001.